Chapter III: Introduction

Croce's family, and early education--His religion--Life in Rome in the eighties--Labriola's influence--Meditations on ethics--Return to Naples; life as a scholar--Travels; and the problem of history --Philosophus fit--The intellectual conditions of Italy after the Risorgimento--Contemporary European culture--American analogies --Two leaders of Italian thought--Francesco de Sanctis--Giosuè Carducci--Croce's approach to philosophy, and his method of work--His relations to the philosophical practition--Vico and the philosophy of the Renaissance--Bruno and Campanella--The humanism of Vico--Naturalism and spiritualism--A philosophy of the human spirit.

I. The Beginnings

Benedetto Croce was born in 1866, in a small town in the Italian province of Aquila, the only son of an old-fashioned, Catholic, and conservative Neapolitan family. His grandfather had been a high magistrate, untouched by the new liberal currents in his devotion to the old régime and to the Bourbon dynasty then reigning in Naples. His father followed the traditional maxim of the "good people" of Naples: that an honest man must take care of his family and of his business, and keep away from the intrigues of political life. His mother was a woman of culture and taste, such as the old type of education for women, which is now as completely forgotten as if it had never existed, used to produce. Bertrando Spaventa, the philosopher, and Silvio Spaventa, a statesman who had brought to his enthusiasm for the national cause all the traditions of his Neapolitan conservatism, were her brothers: both of them, however, estranged from Croce's family because of their political ideas.

The child grew in this greyish, subdued atmosphere, in which the only touches of colour were added by his own passion for books of history and romance, and by the visits to the beautiful old churches to which he accompanied his mother. To the circumstances of his childhood, Croce attributes the relative delay in the development of his political feelings and ideals, for a long time submerged by his interests in literature and erudition. But because every fault brings with itself some compensation, he also owed to them his critical attitude towards partisan political legends, his impatience towards the rhetoric of liberalism, his vehement dislike of great emphatic words, and of any kind of pomp and ceremony, together with a power to appreciate what is useful and effectual in the actions of men, wherever it may come from.

As a boy, he went to a Catholic "collegio" or boarding school, and in this too his experience differed from that of the majority of his contemporaries. The insistence on lay education imparted by the State, and the preference for the day school, which allows the family to supplement the work of the school, in fact, to take care of the moral and social side of education, as distinct from the purely intellectual one, are characteristics of the new Italian methods, obviously in keeping with the general tendencies of the age. I remember that to myself as a boy it was inexplicable why anybody should be sent to a "collegio" unless he were an orphan or an unmanageable scamp. But Croce seems to have enjoyed his experience, to which he was submitted merely in accordance with the habits of his family; and even now he praises the system for breeding in him those feelings of loyalty and honour, which are the result of life in common with boys of one's own age, and of the necessity of adapting oneself to a variety of dispositions and temperaments.

Classical secondary education in Italy roughly corresponds in its scope, even to-day, to that which is imparted in Anglo-Saxon countries by secondary schools and liberal colleges. It is supposed to end the "formative" phase of education, and to lead to the higher phase in the Universities, which is, whether cultural or professional, of a highly specialized and "informative" kind. It is the direct outcome of the humanistic tradition, and rather more so in the clerical schools, like the one which Croce attended, than in the public ones. By the time he was ready for the University, he must have had a good knowledge of the classics, as a general background to a mainly literary and historical culture, in which the elements of scientific knowledge, and a good deal of mathematics, had also their place.

The religion which played such an important part in his family and school life was probably little more than a habit with him: a set of answers to certain fundamental problems which, accepted on the authority of parents and teachers, released his mind for the pursuit of his favourite studies. And yet, there is no doubt that we can find traces of this religious education in all his work: a personal experience of the catholic catechism and of catholic morality brings a spirit in contact with some of the great ideas and of the great realities of life in a much more intimate and profound way than the purely intellectual apprehensions of the same ideas and realities ever will. It creates habits of mind and moral tastes which will still be recognizable even after the individual mind to which they belong has undergone the most radical changes. In a philosopher, in particular, it forms a kind of personal background to thought, similar to that which modern philosophy actually has in its own history: it reproduces in the youth of one man that religious phase which corresponds to the youth of a civilization, and is the source of the intellectual development of a more conscious age. At intervals during his adolescence, Croce's faith intensified itself into passing aspirations towards a life of devotion, until it quietly vanished, so to speak, from his consciousness, through no great dramatic crisis, but merely in consequence of a course of lessons on the philosophy of religion, which were intended to strengthen it and make it more resistant to criticism, during the last years of his secondary education. At about the same time, having come under the influence of both Carducci and De Sanctis, he began to write, and contributed his first articles to a literary weekly, the _Fanfulla della Domenica_, which represented the most vigorous and advanced tendencies of the day.

In 1883, in the earthquake of Casamicciola, in the island of Ischia near Naples, Croce lost both his parents and his only sister, he himself remaining buried for several hours under the ruins, and broken in several parts of his body. The years immediately following were the "saddest and darkest" of his life, and he spent them in Rome in the house of his uncle Silvio Spaventa, which was one of the most conspicuous political and intellectual centres of the capital of the new kingdom. Spaventa was one of the leaders of the Right, or Conservative party, which had been thrown out of office by the Left, or Liberal party, a few years before; by him and by his friends the young Croce was strengthened in his mistrust of the prevailing ideas and methods, which he heard bitterly and sarcastically criticised by men of great culture and of profound political honesty. While his temperament and the shadow of his grief kept him away from the brilliant social life of the Roman _jeunesse dorée_ his relations with the men of a party which had little hope of ever coming back to power prevented him from taking any part in active political life, in sharp contrast with the habits of the majority of Italian university students, to whom politics are what the major sports are to Anglo-Saxon students. He divided his time between the University and the great Roman libraries, among which the one he loved best was the Casanatense, in those years still served by Dominican monks, a typical old monastic library, its benches provided with old-fashioned inkhorns, sandboxes with golden sand, and goose-quills. Anyone seeing him there, buried among his ancient and curious books, and not suspecting the deep perpetual dissatisfaction and unhappiness which accompanied him in a work which seemed to be but a work of love, would have prophesied for him the life of one of those ascetics of erudition, intoxicated by the romantic dust of the past, who still haunt the solemn halls and the dark corridors of the libraries of the old world.

But the great event of his University life, the one which awakened him from the torpor of mere erudition, and set before him a new goal and a higher hope, was the lessons on moral philosophy which he heard from Antonio Labriola. Croce himself has described this new, decisive experience: "Those lessons came unexpectedly to meet my harrowing need of rebuilding for myself in a rational form a faith in life, and in the aims and duties of life; I had lost the guidance of a religious doctrine, and at the same time I was feeling the obscure danger of materialistic theories, whether sensistic or associationistic, about which I had no illusions at all, as I clearly perceived in them the substantial negation of morality itself, resolved into a more or less disguised egotism. Herbart's ethics taught by Labriola restored in my mind the majesty of the ideal, of _that which has to be_ as opposed to _that which is,_ and mysterious in its opposition, but because of this same mysteriousness, absolute and uncompromising."[1] Labriola's influence on Croce was not limited to the classroom; the professor and the student became friends, and Croce enjoyed the benefit of his wonderful gifts as a conversationalist, on which even more than on his academic activity, or on his published work, his fame rests. He seems to have been an awakener of souls, an intellectual stimulant in the fashion of the Greek philosophers, a breaker of new paths and a spiritual guide such as a younger generation had in the mathematician Vailati.

The mind of the young scholar is henceforth constantly occupied by meditations on the concepts of pleasure and duty, of purity and impurity, of actions prompted by the attraction of the pure, moral idea, and of actions which result in apparent moral effects through psychic associations, through habits, through the impulse of the passions. It is easy to discover the dependence of such meditations on the early religious education of Croce; they are the link, in fact, between his religion and his philosophy, since we find them, at a more mature and elaborate stage, reflected in the third volume of his _Philosophy of Mind,_ which, to the eyes of its author, has still an almost autobiographical aspect, entirely concealed from the reader by its didascalic form.

The plan of life that he sketched for himself about this time, was a distinctly disillusioned and pessimistic one: on one hand, he would pursue his erudite and literary work, partly because of his natural inclination towards it, and partly because one has anyhow to do something in this world; and he would, on the other hand, fulfil his moral duties to the best of his capacity, conceiving them to be above all _duties of compassion._ In later years he criticised this view as a purely selfish one, since "the true and high compassion is that which one practices by setting the whole of one's self in harmony with the ends of reality, and by compelling others too to move towards those ends, and a kind heart makes itself truly and seriously kind only through an ever broader and deeper understanding."[2]

After three years of residence in Rome, Croce returned to Naples, where he lived in the society of curious and learned old men, librarians and archivists, all absorbed in minute and painstaking historical researches. The moderate fortune which he had inherited from his parents gave him the independence he needed for his quiet, laborious tastes, and allowed him gradually to collect in his own house a very large and precious library. To it he owed also the possibility of learning without teaching, and therefore of keeping his own work entirely free from any academic taint: of subordinating his studies rather to the necessities of the development of his own personality than to those of professional specialization.

Practically all the production of the years between 1886 and 1892 is concerned with one aspect or another of the history of Naples. Through his researches on the Neapolitan theatres, on Neapolitan life in the eighteenth century, and on the literature of the seventeenth century, he acquired an intimate and exhaustive knowledge of the minutest literary, political, social and archæological details of that life of his own city, which was the immediate historical background of his own life. Towards the end of this period, this complex activity crystallized itself into two rather ambitious enterprises: the editing of a _Biblioteca letteraria napoletana_, for the publication of texts and documents of Neapolitan literature; and of a periodical, _Napoli Nobilissima_, which in the fifteen years of its existence collected an enormous amount of material for the history and archæology of Naples, and to which Croce himself contributed the essays of his _Storie e leggende napoletane_.

We have here a Croce, who, though not a professor, was yet truly a specialist: one of that great host of local and municipal historians which are to be met with in even the least important Italian towns. And undoubtedly this kind of activity offered him, as he willingly acknowledges, not only an outlet for his youthful imagination, in the reconstruction of an adventurous and picturesque past, but a formal discipline of precision and thoroughness in scientific work. But it must be remembered that municipal or regional history in Italy has in many cases the breadth and depth of national history in other countries, because of the number and variety of divergent political, literary and artistic traditions which are present in the life of each Italian city or state. And Naples, though she never had as preponderant a part in the formation of the national consciousness as either Rome or Florence, was a world in herself, with her own art and poetry, with her own philosophical and political tendencies, with her peculiar relations to non-Italian states and cultures, such as France and Spain. Croce's Neapolitan researches, however specialized and barren they may appear at first sight, were therefore well fitted to give him, in one particular instance, that direct and concrete experience of historical reality, of a complex and variegated historical reality, which is among the necessary premises of his philosophical thought. They gave him also a clearer consciousness of the processes of thought which were naturally connected with that particular experience, and they thus helped him to penetrate the minds of his two great Neapolitan predecessors, Vico and De Sanctis. And finally, especially through his interest in the cultural relations between Naples and Spain, they enlarged his horizon from the problems of local to those of general European history.

He visited, always as a scholar, not only Spain, but France and England and Germany, constantly widening the range of his excursions in libraries and archives. But the more he acquired of the knowledge of individual facts, the deeper he felt the futility and vacuity of their purely material accumulation. There was no end, apparently, to the labor of research and erudition, unless a guiding and limiting principle should be found: by the mere piling up of historical information, however minute and exact, it would be forever impossible to decipher the secret of the past. No amount of erudition would ever make history. It is no wonder that to a mind which already had been preoccupied with religious and moral problems, the problem of its own work should present itself with the same intensity and in the same shape as a moral experience. He began to feel a satiety and distaste for that which he had once thought would be the labour of his whole life, and a yearning for a more satisfying, more _intimate_ form of activity. He felt a vague attraction towards a new type of history, moral history, in relation to which all his previous researches appeared as a kind of amorphous and unconscious preparation. He planned a book on the psychological and spiritual history of Italy from the Renaissance to our own times, and he undertook a series of studies on the relations between Spain and Italy, to be followed by similar work in regard to the other nations of Europe, as necessary to a full understanding of his main theme.

But his old methods and habits followed him in the new field: again it seemed to him that there would be no end to his merely preparatory work, once he had undertaken it in what was practically still his old spirit. In fact he had sensed a spiritual need which had announced itself by that peculiar feeling so closely resembling one of moral dissatisfaction, but he had not been able as yet to formulate the terms of his problem. It is probable that what kept him for quite a long time from doing so was partly the character of his literary education, and partly a kind of intellectual humility, which made him distrust his own powers, on entering into a completely new form of mental activity.

The problem which he had to solve for himself was, indeed, not an historical, or philological, or archæological one, but a purely philosophical one: the problem of the nature of history and of science. We know with what religious awe Croce regarded the professional philosophers at the time; and certainly nothing could have been more painful to the young and modest scholar than the thought of stepping beyond the limits of his own specialty, and invading a ground so powerfully occupied and defended. But Croce discovered through his own experience that you cannot reject a problem, once it is forced upon you by the facts of your own life, and that _philosophus fit_ with the same kind of necessity with which _poeta nascitur._ It is from this point that we can observe the transformation of the young scholar into a philosopher; his philosophical career will appear to us as a continued effort towards the solution of that first problem, and of all the problems which followed in its train. The last answer to it is in Croce's theory of the identity of history and philosophy; and the dependence of this theory on the first impulse from which the whole of his philosophy arose is clearly visible in the desire which he has again and again expressed and partly fulfilled in his latest writings, of going back from abstract and formal philosophy to the philosophy of particular facts or history: _storia pensata_; "since this is the meaning of the identity of philosophy and history, that we philosophize whenever we think, whatever may be the subject or form of our thought."[3] The philosophy of Croce, which begins with the raw material of history, presenting itself as a dense, impenetrable mass, ends in a new conception of history, which is permeated in all its parts by the vivifying breath of thought.

I may add here, since it will be very hard to interrupt the history of his intellectual development with biographical details, that the new direction of his thought did not alter Croce's external mode of life; that the discipline acquired in his early work remained the norm of all his later activity; that he accepted public offices in his own town, and later as a senator (which in Italy is a life-office) and as a Minister of Public Education in the last Giolitti Cabinet, certainly more out of the consciousness of a moral obligation than through his inclination or his ambition. His life on the whole has been and is essentially that of the scholar and of the thinker: his work, a political work only in the wide meaning which Plato gives to the word.

[Footnote 1: _Contributo,_ pp. 21, 22; and _passim_, pp. 1-30, for practically the whole substance of this section.]

[Footnote 2: _Contributo_, p. 23.]

[Footnote 3: _Contributo_, p. 81.]

II. Early Environment

Benedetto Croce was thirty-four years old in nineteen hundred: his education (if it is possible to set a term to the education of a philosopher) is therefore the work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A rapid examination of the intellectual conditions of Italy during those years will help us to see that education in its true light, that is, as a reaction to, rather than a fruit of, the environment.

The Risorgimento, with its fifty years of wars and revolutions coming close on the heels of the great Napoleonic upheaval, left Italy materially and morally exhausted. After centuries of foreign domination, of political and spiritual servitude, all the elements of Italian culture had been gathered by the two generations of the Risorgimento into a new culture, which was much more an instrument of combat, for the conquest of unity and independence, considered as the necessary premises of national life, than the best soil for the spiritual growth of that life after the conquest. This new culture, in the poets who had announced and formed it, Parini, Alfieri, Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni, in its philosophers, Rosmini and Gioberti, and in its prophet and apostle, Mazzini, had forms and spirits, the value and meaning of which by far transcended the importance of its immediate historical purpose; but through the difficulties and labors of the practical effort, it reached the end of the period shorn of a good deal of what was deepest, most beautiful, nearest to the universal, in it. Italy in 1870 was very much like the sprinter who wins the race, but collapses at the crossing of the line.

The culture of Italy had been for centuries oscillating between the pursuit and discovery of certain universal values, which had gradually become part of the common European culture (the Roman idea, the Christian idea, the main principles, æsthetic and moral, of the Renaissance), and the development of purely local, regional characteristics. At the end of the Risorgimento, the links that had kept Italian culture in constant contact with the rest of Europe were broken, and on the other hand the local cultures found themselves, as it were, lost and submerged in the new political readjustment, threatened in their very existence by the new claim of loyalty advanced by a literary and abstract national ideal. The duties of Italian culture, clearer to us now than to the men who lived in the midst of those events, were then, on one side, to re-establish the connection between Italian and European culture, and this time more by learning than by teaching--and on the other side to utilize the less particular elements of the regional cultures as a foundation for a real and concrete and diffused cultural life in the nation.

Thus Italy becomes, at the beginning of her new, unified existence, little more than a province of European thought. She looks around herself and she is compelled to take notice of what had happened beyond her frontiers during the last two or three centuries. It is interesting to compare the characteristics of the other great nations of Europe as they appear to Italy during and after the Risorgimento. England, who had been a symbol of political liberty, a source of political and economic wisdom, reappears as a model of industrial development and at the same time as the proclaimer of a new creed to the world, the creed of evolution, which after having infused a fresh spirit in the natural sciences with Darwin, seems to promise a new interpretation of human life, a new organization of science and of social thought, with Spencer. France, the mother of revolutions, the deliverer of the spirit of man from the shackles of divine and earthly tyranny, remains, in a vague and hazy fashion, through the many disappointments that her policies give to her Italian lovers during all this period, the same kind of inspiration that she has been ever since the Encyclopédie and the Revolutions; but contributes to the new effort little more than her veristic fiction, in which art itself is reduced to a handmaid of the goddess of the hour, biological and social science.

Germany had saturated with the romantic atmosphere of her poetry the passionate struggle of the times, and she had captured a little band of thoughtful patriots, among whom we find Croce's uncle, Bertrando Spaventa, with the fascination of her new metaphysics, in which they found the fulfilment of all the promises of Italian thought in the foregoing centuries; but after her victory over France, the same cause that makes French influence less vigorous, makes also German influence less deep and less inspiring. A Germany who has like Faust sold her romantic and metaphysical soul, yields only a shadow of her great historical and philosophical culture of the eighteenth and of the first half of the nineteenth century, though a tremendously powerful one, and such that for a long time it overawes the academic mind not of Italy only, but of the whole continent. A narrow and materialistic philology, under the name of historical method, becomes the heir to the humanistic tradition, and substitutes itself for every native impulse, even in fields in which Italian thought had been master for centuries, as in that of law: where it mercilessly destroys, of the ideologies of the Risorgimento, not only that which was arbitrary and fanciful, and therefore destined to perish, but even that which through the subsequent course of history was to prove vital and sound. The Italian school of international law, the new conception of the Law of Nations, for instance, which was the fruit of the Italian juridical tradition during the experiences of the Risorgimento, and which is the more or less consciously accepted foundation of all the doctrines of international relations striving for realization in our times, in no country and in no schools was so resolutely repudiated as in the Italian universities. And it could not have been otherwise, since the new philology was as static and deterministic a doctrine, only more logically and rigorously so, as the evolutionary positivism which we had learnt from England.

The faults of Italian culture during this period are therefore the faults of the other European cultures which Italy had to assimilate: at a time when Italy was most in need of cultural help from without, she found that, for reasons infinitely complex and totally different from those which had caused her own exhaustion, the other nations of Europe were also spiritually exhausted. And yet it cannot be said that from these very faults Italy did not draw some useful lessons. The so-called historical method, which completely disregarded the great forces of history, and made of the least significant historical datum a _Ding an sich_ in which the mind of the scholar seemed to find its ultimate object, proved in the end to be a salutary discipline as against the facile and enthusiastic generalizations of the historians of the Risorgimento. Positivism, however barbarous and uncouth in itself, was a powerful weapon for the destruction of the last remnants of a more or less mythological metaphysics, and in that sense it afforded an example of intellectual honesty; and at the same time it awakened the consciousness of the continuity of natural and spiritual life, announcing, though in a hasty and imperfect synthesis, what every philosophy of the future will have to be. And about the middle of the period which we are now considering, the only real contribution of Germany to European thought in the second half of the century became known in Italy with the advent of Marxism, in which we found a new conception of history, in so far adequate to the true spirit and conditions of the times, as it afforded to blind social forces, striving for political expression, an interpretation of their needs and a rationalized programme of action.

The analogies between this general cultural atmosphere, and the present conditions of the intellectual world in America, are, provided we do not stress them too hard, so striking that I cannot refrain from calling the attention of the reader to them. I believe this will help him to apply a good many of Croce's criticisms and ideas to tendencies and problems with which he is thoroughly familiar. The most recent forms of American philosophy, pragmatism, instrumentalism, realism, are indigenous elaborations of that same English positivism and empiricism which was dominant in Italy a generation ago: the relations between science and philosophy are seen in the same light in America to-day as in Italy before the beginning of this century. And the two most significant and far-reaching directions of research, social psychology and psychoanalysis, branching out into every ramification of social and moral and æsthetic thought, are based on assumptions, and lead to results, very similar to those of the Spencerian sociology and of the Lombrosian theory of insanity and genius. Even in fiction America is to-day trying her hand at verism, and in poetry, apart from a few marked exceptions, she is experimenting in the same spirit in which we began to follow, about the end of the period, the most recent fashions of Paris in verslibrism and decadentism. In academic circles German philology has maintained its sway for a much longer time than in Europe, and the war has brought about more an emotional than an intellectual consciousness of the need of a vaster and deeper understanding of history. Finally, certain aspirations towards ancient and totally different systems of moral and æsthetic standards, embraced with an enthusiasm that is akin to an act of faith--the hope to discover a refuge and a consolation from the chaos of modernity in a restoration of classical or mediæval ideals--are American varieties of an attitude of mind which found its satisfaction in Italy in patterns which we drew after the models of Ruskinism and of French traditionalism.

On the whole, Italian culture was suffering from the effects of the same delusion which accounts for the straits in which American culture is to-day: that European culture could be assimilated through its representatives at one particular moment only, and as if it were at the surface of time, rather than by the only legitimate and fruitful method, which is that of delving beneath that surface for the truly fundamental contributions that each nation has made to the common mind. Not one of the nations of Europe was then, or is now, at one of those turning points in the history of culture in which principles of universal value are elaborated within the limits of a single national group. The only possible exception was that of Russia, sending out to an age-worn Europe a fresh message of human pity and Christian love in a succession of epic masterpieces; but the quality of the message was such as to affect the heart much more than the intellect, to produce a new and deeper feeling rather than a sounder knowledge.

Two great individual figures, however, dominate the whole period, and among so many contrasting currents of thought and feeling, among the fluctuating fashions of the times, connect the new generations with the traditional elements of Italian culture. That breadth of vision, that sense of the perspective of history, which was totally lacking in the prevailing cosmopolitan thought, was a conspicuous characteristic of the work of a great critic, Francesco de Sanctis, and of a great poet, Giosuè Carducci. And what made the secret of the strength of the one as well as of the other, was their fidelity to the regional traditions from which they were issued, coupled with a power to invest them with a much broader significance than they had ever possessed. With De Sanctis, the speculative trend of the Southern Italian mind, with Carducci the humanism of Florence and Tuscany, for the first time in history become real elements of a greater national consciousness. Neither the one nor the other was, moreover, without a knowledge of, and a taste for, foreign cultures; but what they gained from these were elements of more permanent value than the ones which attracted the attention of the crowds, and they both succeeded in grafting those foreign elements on their native dispositions in such a way and with so little violence that they seemed to belong rightfully to them. This is true of what De Sanctis learnt from the idealistic philosophers of Germany, and particularly from Hegel, as well as of what Carducci acquired from the great poets and historians of the two previous generations in France, in England, and in Germany. Nor should we marvel at this, since by going deep enough or high enough into any of the European cultures, it is always possible to find a level that is common to all of them.

Francesco de Sanctis was not a philosopher in the strict meaning of the word; yet, among all the European critics of the nineteenth century, he is the only one from whose works it is possible to derive a consistent line of æsthetical thought. His education had been partly philosophical, of old Italian and modern German philosophy; and partly grammatical and rhetorical, in those literary doctrines of the old school which embodied a secular experience, and in comparison with which the modern _science_ of literature is ineffably shallow and puerile. It was through a philosophical elaboration of those doctrines, and through a criticism of the intellectualistic æsthetics of Hegel and his followers, for whom art was the sensuous clothing of the concept, that De Sanctis, guided by an unerring taste and by a unique power for discerning the essential and vital element in poetry, came to his conception of form as not an _a priori,_ a thing by itself and different from the content, but something that is generated by the content itself when active in the mind of the artist. This is the principle which he had constantly in mind in approaching the concrete works of poetry, and which enabled him to analyze and reproduce the terms of the spiritual experiences of which they are an expression. Thus his _Essays_ and his _History of Italian Literature,_ though in a sense the purest and most genuine kind of literary criticism, are at the same time a complete spiritual history of a people, as it reveals itself in its literary manifestations, such as no other country possesses. The immediate influence of his work was not as great as it ought to have been: the generation of philologists who immediately followed him was unable to see in him more than a brilliant exponent of what was then contemptuously called æsthetic criticism, and could never forgive him for his apparent lack of method, due to the circumstances of his life as an exile and a politician. It was only unwittingly, and through the intermediary of a German disciple of De Sanctis, Gaspary, who wrote a standard handbook of Italian literature, that they came to accept the greatest part of his interpretations, and followed the main directions of his thought in their own researches.

Giosuè Carducci was a disciple of Parini and Alfieri, of Foscolo and Leopardi, and in a sense of all that lineage of Italian poets, beginning with Dante and Petrarch, for whom poetry was not less an arduous discipline for the attainment of a certain standard of formal beauty, set down once and forever by the poets of the classical tradition, than a moral and political function in the life of the nation. As his predecessors had been, he was not only a poet, but also a student and historian of literature, of literature as the only field in which that life had truly realized itself. But though his contributions to the study of Italian literature were many and important, and the knowledge and taste which were the instruments of his art made of him an exquisite critic of poetry, yet what even in his historical and critical prose attracts us most is his lyrical imagination, his poetry. And his poetry, on the other hand, is mainly the poetry of the history and of the historical and poetical landscape of Italy,--of an Italy which was to him not merely one among the nations of Europe, but the heir of Greece and of Rome, the cradle of western civilization; not a land and a community limited in space and in time, or not that only, but an ideal of beauty, of freedom, of right, of a full and harmonious life, which was Italian, as it had been Greek and Roman, because it was universally human. In his early works, the contrast between this ideal and the actual conditions of Italy in his times found expression in a strain of invective and satire, from which the poet lifted but rarely his soul to the contemplation of the great deeds and thoughts of the past; of a past which in some cases was very recent, as some of the men of the French Revolution and of the Risorgimento were among his favourite heroes. But later, and especially in his _Odi Barbare,_ for which he adapted a new technique from the metres of ancient Greece, while he added many personal notes to his lyre, his historical inspiration became higher and deeper and purer, and Italy had in his poetry that which she had lacked in all the course of her literature, a true _epos,_ though in a lyrical form, of her secular life, from the fabulous kings and priests of Etruria to that most legendary of all her heroes, Garibaldi.

The influence of Carducci, not a purely literary, but a moral and political one, on the generation to which Croce belongs, can hardly be overestimated; and Croce himself calls his own generation _carducciana_ And the two other great poets that Italy has produced after him, D'Annunzio and Pascoli, were both disciples of Carducci at the beginning of their careers. But the formation of their personalities, so widely divergent in their later developments, is contemporaneous with what we have called the education of Croce, and therefore outside the scope of this rapid review of the circumstances under which that education took place. The growth of the erotic-heroic poetry of D'Annunzio and that of the idyllic-humanitarian poetry of Pascoli are no longer among those circumstances but rather products of the same environment.

III. The Origins of His Thought

There are philosophers for whom it is possible, and relatively easy, to trace the roots of their speculations and of their systems in the thought of one or a few predecessors. The research of what we might call their sources, or more precisely of the terms in which certain problems were handed down to them through the particular philosophical tradition to which they belong, would probably not lead us very far in space or very deep in time: it might be useful in such cases to preface the history of their thought by a brief summary of these immediate antecedents. But in the case of Benedetto Croce, such a summary ought to extend, in relation to the problems in which he is or has been interested, to the whole range of the history of human thought. This is due partly to his peculiar approach to the problems of philosophy, and partly to his method of work.

Philosophy is to him neither a special science nor a specialized technique: not a discipline which requires a scholastic training, and which you can definitely acquire after a given number of years of study, but just what it was in the beginning: that love of wisdom which prompts every man to the exercise of his thinking powers. The problems of philosophy cannot be enumerated and defined, but that which happens to you, or your own doings, in your life, in your conduct, in your work, in your study, is the perpetually renewed material for your meditation. Problems are not given to you from outside, as puzzles at which you might try your skill or duties imposed by a pedagogue: they are your experience, and your philosophy is your conscious logical reaction to them.

This unprofessional and broadly human view of philosophy was not, however, an obvious and spontaneous attitude of Croce's spirit, but a laborious conquest. In the years of his erudite and unphilosophical youth, at his first coming in contact with philosophy in the strict and technical meaning of the word, with philosophical treatises and dissertations, his attitude was one of profound respect for the professors of philosophy, "as I was persuaded," (he tells us in his autobiographical notes), "that they, as specialists, should possess that abstruse science, of whose sacred curtain I had hardly lifted a few folds, and I did not know that in a few years I should with wonder and irritation discover that most of them did not possess anything, not even that very little which I, merely by my good will to understand, had succeeded in acquiring."[4] The fact is that these professors and specialists could hardly be termed philosophers at all, while Croce had already in himself that obscure and tormenting desire for intellectual clarity, which is the beginning of philosophy.

But in this initial ignorance, in his coming as if unaware to the gates of the temple, we shall find the reasons of Croce's method of work. When a given problem presents itself to him, not as a subject of learned controversy, but as a spiritual necessity, he becomes suddenly conscious of the duty of following the history of that particular problem through centuries of thought. The first impulse may come from a mere attempt at understanding the terms under which the problem presents itself to him: a clarification of words. His mental habits are, in fact, those of the conscientious and painstaking philologist, and he brings the method and discipline of the severest erudition into the field of logic. There is no problem for him that is purely logical, in an abstract and formal sense; still less, purely psychological. The mere occasion for his speculation is sometimes offered, as we shall see, by contemporary discussions, but he feels from the very beginning that these discussions are merely concerned with the surface of things, are taking place on a plane of thought, mechanical and dilettantesque, on which all conclusions are equally legitimate and equally irrelevant. Very soon, and long before any trace can be found in his writings of his final identification of philosophy with history, he practically identifies each problem with its own history, by retracing, generally in an inversely chronological order, the original meanings of terms and theories of which contemporary culture gave him only a pale and distorted reflection.

But this intimate and vital contact with the past never leads him to that attitude of reaction, which our forefathers typified in the _laudator temporis acti,_ and which even to-day is so abundantly exemplified by the scholar who, having laboriously climbed the heights of the thought of one man or of one epoch, feels himself in the possession of final truth, and smiles contemptuously on the childishness of the moderns. He is as much on his guard against the idols of the school as against the idols of the market place. His relation to the great thinkers of the past is not one of blind discipleship, but of critical collaboration. The favourite process of his own thought might be defined as one of historical integration.

By emphasizing one aspect or another of Croce's philosophy, it is possible, however, to connect him more particularly with one or another philosopher. The name that is most frequently pronounced in this connection is that of Hegel, probably because Hegel stands, in the mind of the positivist and of the pragmatist, for a certain type of thought, much more ancient than Hegel himself and practically coextensive with the history of philosophy, rather than for what Hegelianism actually is. The facile critic of Croce, who condemns and rejects him as a Hegelian, would probably find it very hard to define the actual points of contact between the two thinkers; but we know that the word "Hegelian" is more a term of abuse, in such cases, than the expression of a critical judgment. Croce himself has defined his attitude towards Hegel, and generally towards the philosophers of the past, in the conclusion of his examination of Hegel's thought: "I am, and I believe one has to be, Hegelian; but in the same sense in which any man who to-day has a philosophical mind and culture, is and feels himself, at the same time, Eleatic, Heraclitean, Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Sceptic, Neoplatonic, Christian, Buddhist, Cartesian, Spinozian, Leibnitzian, Vichian, Kantian, and so on. That is, in the sense that no thinker, and no historical movement of thought, can have passed without fruit, without leaving behind an element of truth, which is an either conscious or unconscious part of living and modern thought. A Hegelian, in the meaning of a servile and bigoted follower, professing to accept every word of the master, or of a religious sectarian, who considers dissension as a sin, no sane person wants to be, and no more I. Hegel has discovered, as others have done, one phase of truth; and this phase one has to recognize and defend: this is all. If this shall not take place now, it matters little. 'The Idea is not in haste,' as Hegel was wont to say. To the same content of truth we shall come, some day, through a different road, and, if we shall not have availed ourselves of his direct help, looking back on the history of thought we shall have to proclaim him, with many an expression of wonder, a forerunner."[5]

This last hypothesis describes what actually happened in the case of another among the ancestors of Croce's Philosophy of Mind. For two centuries either unknown or misunderstood, Vico came into his own only a few years ago, and mainly through the efforts of Croce himself. In Vico, that is in Italy at the beginning of the eighteenth century, practically all the germs of the idealistic philosophy, and of the historical and critical culture of the nineteenth century, were already present, as a natural development of the philosophical and humanistic Renaissance. And it is through what, in Vichian style, we may call the discovery of the true Vico, that Croce inserts himself in the central tradition of Italian, and European, culture, and is saved from the dangers inherent in his catholic attitude towards the philosophers of the past, that of a material, mosaic-like eclecticism on one side, and that of a metaphysical syncretism, such as led Hegel to the dialectic constructions of his Philosophy of History, on the other.

The philosophy of the Renaissance, in which the fundamental impulses that are the soul of that movement find their clear and distinct expression, had produced a new naturalism and a new spiritualism with Giordano Bruno and Tomaso Campanella: that is, two widely divergent views of reality, which however had sprung from a common source, the opposition to that scholastic synthesis in which all the transcendental elements of Greek and Roman philosophy had been gathered to the support of mediæval theology, in direct relation with the mediæval description of the cosmos. There has probably never been made in the world, either before or after the Middle Ages, such a resolute and comprehensive attempt at an intellectual understanding of the moral and material universe, as the one that is the work of mediæval philosophy: but that attempt had been made possible, and had brought definite results, only through the acceptation of the limits of revealed truth, which, however freely accepted, proved in the end to be much more compelling than to the modern scientist are the freely accepted limits of external reality. Revealed truth could not be a mere object of thought, as it carried within itself, under the mythological disguise, its own metaphysics and its own ethics: a new principle, in fact, a more absolute and intimate spirituality than had been known to either the Greeks or the Romans, which attracted to itself all the kindred elements in ancient thought, and determined the essential characteristics of mediæval speculation.

The discovery and establishment of this spiritual principle, as a universal reality which transcends nature and the spirit of man, and which to this natural and human world is as a law dictated from outside and from above, is the message of the Middle Ages, not in pure philosophy only, but in religion and ethics, in science and in the life of society. The Renaissance is the beginning of our modern world, inasmuch as it is, through the infinite variety of its artistic, social, religious, scientific manifestations, an effort to see that same spiritual principle no longer as a transcending reality, but as the active, immanent, all-pervading soul of immediate reality, both natural and human. The Ptolemaic cosmography, which is the visible form of mediæval thought, a system of the finite universe, of which the Earth is the centre, and which leaves an infinite space for the seat of the only real, transcending existences, beyond the compass of the heavenly spheres, and as if it were outside itself, loses its hold on the imagination, and therefore on the conscience of men, long before Copernicus and Galileo read in the skies a new system of an infinite universe, within which, or nowhere, the divine principle must live and work.

The impulse towards the identification of the spirit with nature, on one side, and with man on the other, had been at work in Italian life and thought all through the Renaissance; but it is only at the end of that miraculous spring of Western civilization, between the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, that it expresses itself in the philosophies of Bruno and Campanella. Bruno presents himself as an expounder and defender of Copernican astronomy, and Campanella writes the apology of Galileo. And to each of them the scientific discoveries are much more than mere helps and suggestions for metaphysical speculation; they are the revelation, in one field of human thought, of a new logic which has to be recognized, in one form or another, as the fundamental principle of modern civilization.

Both in Bruno and Campanella, inert remnants of the ancient and mediæval logic are still part of the structure in which their new intuitions try to express themselves; but such remnants are to be met with even in much later philosophers, and constantly reappear, as blind spots in the active process of thought, in the whole history of European philosophy down to our days. What is significant of each thinker, what marks him as the legitimate interpreter of the deepest spiritual life of his times, is not his system as a whole, but the particular new intuition on which in each case the system is founded: in Bruno, the conception of an infinite universe, and of the infinite life of God in the universe; in Campanella, the affirmation of the value of human experience and human consciousness, to which God is present _per tactum intrinsecum,_ intrinsically, and in which knowing and being coincide.

The two main directions of modern thought, or rather of all human thought, are thus represented in the naturalism of Bruno and in the spiritualism of Campanella, at the conclusion of the Renaissance, respectively prefiguring the pantheism of Spinoza and the rationalism of Descartes, that is, the two systems through which similar conceptions became active and effective in all subsequent developments of European philosophy. And it is useful to recall their names as an introduction to the exposition of the ideas of a modern Italian philosopher, because we are to-day only too prone to identify certain forms of common European thought, originating from Greece and from Italy, with what was only their last expression in the great idealistic movement in Germany in the nineteenth century; where Bruno and Spinoza reappear in Schelling, and Campanella and Descartes, through the intermediary of the English thinkers of the eighteenth century, in Kant and Hegel.

I am not trying to establish an Italian pedigree for the kind of philosophy to which Croce belongs: nowhere are national distinctions so futile as in the history of thought. But the Italy of the Renaissance shares with India and with Greece the purely material privilege of having given birth to a vision of the world and its problems, which is national only in the sense that it was elaborated for a certain time at least by minds belonging to a single nation. The value of that vision, however, does not reside in any tribal or national characteristic, but in those elements of universality, which made of the Italian culture of the Renaissance, and of its inherent logic, the basis of all modern European culture. What can still be recognized as peculiarly Italian, or French, or English, or German in the thought of modern philosophers, is not that phase of truth, which may be present in it, but the element of prejudice, of crowd-mindedness, of spiritual inertia, which even the greatest among them have in common with their weaker brothers.

In Bruno and Campanella we find an interest in certain problems of thought, which we may call either religious or, more technically, ontological: the problems of the relations of being and knowing. In Vico, who is infinitely nearer to Croce in intellectual temper, the centre of interest is shifted. Vico is apparently satisfied with Catholicism as a religion; and he spends all his efforts in creating a philosophy out of the purely humanistic and historical side of Renaissance culture. And yet, long before Kant's _Prolegomena,_ he foresees the necessity of the new metaphysics being the metaphysics, as he says, of human ideas, and his theory of knowledge is founded on a principle which bears an external resemblance to certain aspects of pragmatism, but is in reality of a quite different, and much deeper, character: that of the interchangeability of the _factum_ with the _verum,_ of that which we make with that which we know. It was a commonplace of the schools that perfect science is to be found in God only who is the author of all things: Vico transfers this logical formula from God to man, and applies it, in the first stage of his thought, to mathematics, which appears to him as of man's own _making,_ in a narrow and abstract sense, and later to the whole world of history and human thought and action, which, in a much truer and broader sense, is _made_ by man.

Vico was brought to this second and final form of his theory of knowledge by his studies on the history of law, of religion, of language and poetry: his philosophy is essentially a philosophy of the moral sciences, of philology in its widest meaning. And the whole of his speculation, in his Scienza Nuova takes the shape of an enquiry into the origins and development of human society: not essentially of a sociology, an empirical and inductive science of man (though this aspect is undoubtedly also present in his mind), but rather, through "the unity of the human spirit that informs and gives life to this world of nations," of an ideal and eternal history of mankind, a philosophy of the human mind.

A contemporary and an antagonist of Descartes, Vico is one of the last among European philosophers to embrace practically the whole range of contemporary culture. But while Descartes lays the foundations of his theory of knowledge on the certainty of mathematical method, mistrusting the imperfection and vagueness of any other form of science, Vico is enabled by his intimate contact with rhetoric and history, with that _philology_ which had been the soul of the intellectual life of the Renaissance, and which through the erudition of his century was preparing the historical consciousness of the following one, to anticipate the general principles of idealistic philosophy and, on the theories of art, of language, of law, of religion, as well as on a large number of particular historical problems, the general development of subsequent European thought.

At a later stage in our exposition, we shall examine in greater detail the indebtedness of Croce to Vico, especially as regards the theory of art and language; but the similarities of circumstance and of temperament between the two philosophers are already apparent. Both Vico and Croce came to philosophy through erudition and philology; and in Croce as well as in Vico, the fundamental philosophic attitude, their theory of knowledge, their idealism (what in the case of Croce has been called his Hegelism), is the intrinsic and necessary logic of the same humanistic tradition, the natural outcome of the centering of their intellectual interests on the history of the human spirit rather than on the mathematical or natural sciences. It is only after Descartes and Vico, and through the independent progress of scientific thought in the last two centuries (during the Renaissance, science is constantly in contact with philology, and there is no scientist who is not also a humanist)--that the two divergent attitudes of mind which we have seen exemplified in Bruno and Campanella, naturalism and spiritualism, are finally divorced from each other, and respectively linked with the scientific or with the historical aspect of modern European culture. Rationalism, intellectualism, positivism, pragmatism, on one side, are the more and more rarefied logics of science, in its progressive estrangement from the humanities; and because of the increasing prestige of scientific thought, we see them making constant inroads even in the fields of the historical and philological disciplines. Idealism, on the other side, represents in its many forms the central tradition of European culture, and is heir to the religious thought of the Middle Ages as well as to the humanism of the Renaissance; but in many of its exponents, and to my mind, even in some aspects of Croce's philosophy, it suffers from that same condition of things which is the cause of the poverty and narrowness of the so-called scientific philosophies: from that inability to grasp both nature and the spirit of man, the world of science and the world of history, which is a characteristic of our times. The recurrence of the realistic position, after every great affirmation of idealistic philosophy, is certainly not the mere recurrence of error, the obstinate permanence of human folly after the pronouncements of wisdom, but rather the restatement of a logical exigency which cannot be entirely satisfied and disposed of by any of the idealistic solutions of the problem of reality. Idealism and realism in modern philosophy are two distinct and divergent elaborations of different fields of modern culture: that unity of the intellectual vision, which is perfect, within its accepted limitations, in mediæval philosophy, and which is never entirely lost sight of in the thought of the Renaissance, is the goal towards which both realism and idealism continually tend, but which will not be reached by either, until the _disiecta membra_ of our intellectual consciousness will be brought together through a higher synthesis than the one from which they fell apart at the end of the Renaissance.

We are now in a position to understand why it would be vain to look in the work of Croce for either an organized synthesis of scientific thought, understood as a means through which the mind of man grasps the reality of nature, or a system of metaphysics attempting to explain the facts of our human life by reference to an order of superhuman and supernatural realities. These are two types of philosophy, a criticism of which is implicit in every step of Croce's philosophical career, as well as in the quality of his philosophical ancestry. But in their place we shall find a series of meditations on the problems of the human spirit in its actual historical development; on the distinctions and inter-relations of the various forms of spiritual activity, not as they appear, in a purely abstract and external consideration, to the eye of the psychologist, but as they reveal themselves in the intimacy of those spiritual and historical processes, in which man creates at the same time his own being and his own truth. As we have stated already, the philosophy of Croce is essentially a philosophy of the humanistic tradition, of that Italian and European tradition the consciousness of which seems to be fast disappearing even among those who consider themselves as its exponents and defenders; and which in his thought not only justifies and understands itself, but brings that justification and that understanding to a greater depth, to a more comprehensive clarity, than it ever reached during the many centuries of its existence.

[Footnote 4: _Contributo_, p. 26.]

[Footnote 5: _Hegel,_ pp. 147-8.]

PART FIRST

FROM PHILOLOGY TO PHILOSOPHY

(1893-1899)